The present invention relates to a self-loading tobacco trailer and, more particularly, an apparatus for loading cut tobacco stalks onto a trailer for transport to and from a curing cell.
Burley tobacco plants grow as relatively tall stalks with the tobacco leaves growing radially out from the stalks. When the burley tobacco plant stalks are cut down, the widest portion (bottom of the stalk) of the main stem is manually or mechanically skewered onto a wooden or steel stake which has a sharpened point affixed at one end thereto. Generally, each stake is about four feet long, and about five or six different plants are threaded onto each stake and pushed toward the intermediate portion of the stake away from the opposite free ends of the stake. In the past, the stakes would be carried to curing sheds or manually positioned on tobacco trailers for transport thereto.
The stakes would then be manually hung across beams or supports within the curing shed and packed fairly tightly therein. The stakes were usually stored in levels or tiers within the wooden curing shed, there being three or four tiers of tobacco stakes hung within any single curing shed. Such practice is a very labor intensive operation requiring many man hours and fairly dangerous work conditions. Particularly, the elevating scaffold trailer disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,306,114, the disclosure of which is hereby fully incorporated by reference herein, provides an elevating tobacco trailer for automatically loading and unloading tobacco rods into and out of a curing shed, thereby avoiding the manual transfer of tobacco rods between the trailer and curing shed racks.
It is additionally desirable to alleviate such work conditions at the point of loading the trailer. It is thus desirable to provide a self-loading tobacco trailer configured such that tobacco rods may be loaded manually or mechanically thereon at a convenient height and, thereafter, propelled to a loaded position upon the trailer.